Nescire aude.

March 28, 2015

A small thought about the paper that was also the subject of my previous post (and, don't you worry, is intended to be the subject of my subsequent post, at impractical length). Lawlor places a great deal of weight in §3 on what it feels like to a person attempting to figure out (as that person would put it) what they want; in particular, on the fact that it feels like they're figuring out what they want, i.e., what they in fact presently do desire though they don't know it. It seems to me that this use of how-it-feels presumes on its being both remarkably innocent and remarkably sophisticated.

Innocent the way Gombrich denied that there was an "innocent eye": that "the way it feels" is simply given, not colored by how, for instance, the general vocabulary for talking about desire might lead us to conceptualize our experience. "I don't know which one I want" when said of two dishes at a restaurant, for instance, doesn't suggest to me that there is one I want and I don't know which one that is (just as "I want a wife" doesn't suggest that there is a specific wife whom I want), but that's the form of phrase we have for talking about our desires or lack thereof. If one has a set of recurrent imaginings, feelings, etc. regarding a second child and is brought to reflect on them, "I don't know whether I want a second child" is how one is apt to put it; isn't that apt to influence whether or not one conceives of the recurrent whatevers as signs of an unknown desire, rather than something else?

Sophistication is the flip-side of innocence: if the way it feels isn't simply given, then we're sufficiently discerning to tell that this is the way having an unknown desire feels, and it's also not the way anything else feels. Recall the (apocryphal? from my perspective, anyway) anecdote about Wittgenstein, which I have from either Ted Cohen or David Hills, who, hearing someone explain that we shouldn't fault people for having thought the sun goes around the earth because "that is how it looks, after all", asked how it would look if the earth went around the sun (perhaps adding "while revolving", I don't know). Well, it would look the way it does look, one hopes, since, one believes, that's what it does do. How would you feel if you didn't have a desire unknown to you, but rather [competing explanation]? Maybe the same!